Theorizing limits: an exploration of boundaries, learning, and emancipation.

Seeking to move beyond limits in order to solve problems is an important part of organizational learning and is therefore potentially emancipatory. Communicating across boundaries in order to expand capabilities might contribute to understanding and therefore to community building. Organizational learning (OL) is a topic of increasing interest to organizations as they face unparalleled environmental uncertainty and turbulence; it may even be the only real competitive advantage. OL is about solving or overcoming organizational problems through knowledge and decision making. Differences in perspectives and in purposes are negotiated via communication, which, in organization studies is largely assumed to mean that those in power need to speak clearly and persuasively in order to most effectively impose his or her predetermined meaning on members. However, as critical theorists have pointed out; communication is not a simply technique with which to exercise power. A logical alternative to closed systems thinking is open systems, whose function is to provide a rationality of understanding differences by attention to equifinality, feedback and differentiation.